Summarising the evidence: exploring what we know about drivers of violence against women, family violence and other forms of gendered violence

Overview

This project aims to better understand the extent to which addressing the gendered drivers of men’s violence against women is likely to contribute to preventing other forms of family and gendered violence.  

Respect Victoria commissioned evidence reviews to help understand what we know – and don’t know – about the prevalence, nature, drivers, and risk factors of different forms of violence against women, family and gendered violence. We did this to help explore:

• how addressing the gendered drivers of violence against women may help prevent other forms of family and gendered violence
• where further work is needed to identify additional drivers and reinforcing factors for these other forms of violence
• opportunities to strengthen prevention evidence, policy and practice.

The Summarising the evidence resources set out what we found, presenting key findings from the evidence reviews as research summaries, and explorations of what these findings mean for primary prevention in context briefs. A project overview gives more detail about how we approached the research and why.

The eight research summaries each focus on a particular form of violence against women or family violence. These are:

• adolescent violence in the home  
• child maltreatment
• elder abuse
• men’s intimate partner violence against women
• non-partner sexual assault against women
• online violence and harassment perpetrated against women
• sexual harassment in the workplace
• women’s intimate partner violence against men

The summaries look at definitions, nature, prevalence, and dynamics of each form of violence.  

Six of the research summaries are accompanied by context briefs. These briefs explore the extent to which addressing the gendered drivers of men’s violence against women will help to prevent each specific form of violence. The relevance of the gendered drivers to the remaining summaries (men’s intimate partner violence against women and non-partner sexual assault against women) are discussed in the Project Overview.  

Read together, the research summaries and context briefs indicate that continued efforts to address the gendered drivers of men’s violence against women are very likely to have wider positive impacts in addressing other forms of family and gendered violence.